What Are You Doing Mr. Muller?

What Are You Doing Mr. Muller?

Recently, John Muller, a senior Google professional, has recommended webmasters not to use hidden texts on their websites and show all relevant hidden texts. He has given this recommendation in response to a thread on Google Webmaster Help. Do you want to know what exactly he said? He said,

“I’d recommend not using hidden text to hide keywords on a page. If something is relevant to the page, then it’s probably relevant to the user too, so I’d recommend showing it to the user.”

I don’t know what others think, but for me his recommendation is beyond my comprehension level. What logic he has applied I could not understand. You would be thinking why I am raising my finger on his recommendation – if he has said something, definitely he would have thought a lot about the same and would be sure about its consequences. But, I don’t see any point in this recommendation. What many eCommerce stores and service providers do, they write descriptions about their products and services in brief and add the option ‘read more’ with them as the number of products and services is plenty and they want to acknowledge their website visitors about every product and service on the same page. When website visitors click on the option ‘read more’, detailed information opens on the very same page. As per this recommendation, the sites should not hide anything. They should not add the option ‘read more’ for the content which opens on the very same page. If they do this, the hidden content would not be cached and all such websites will face drop in their search rankings. That content will be cached only if that opens in a new page. Now, if an eCommerce store or a service provider provides detailed information about every product and service in detail on the same page, how that will succeed to reflect information about such products and services on one page. This will neither benefit the site nor the visitors, as the websites would have to create more pages to describe their products and services and visitors would have to spend more time to find what they are looking for on the website. And the same would also become a big reason for visitors to switch from one site to another, hence drop in sales for such websites.